Elop wrote that Microsoft’s new focus “will require changes, which the company expects will have an impact to our team structure.”

Elop said that the reduction of 12,500 factory direct and professional employees over the next year were difficult decisions. “We plan to support departing team members’ with severance benefits,” Elop wrote.

It wasn’t the first of Elop’s emails to staff to raise eyebrows.

In 2011, while still Nokia CEO, Elop wrote a memo to employees that has become the stuff of legend.

Headlined, “The Burning Platform,” the memo started off painting a picture of a man stranded on a burning oil platform in the North Sea.

“As the fire approached him, the man had mere seconds to react. He could stand on the platform, and inevitably be consumed by the burning flames. Or, he could plunge 30 meters in to the freezing waters. The man was standing upon a ‘burning platform,’ and he needed to make a choice. He decided to jump…. We too, are standing on a ‘burning platform,’ and we must decide how we are going to change our behavior,” Elop wrote then.